In this last post on Charles Haertling’s residential work, I have used the term Regional Modernist to describe a collection of houses that is a bit more difficult to define than his more assertively formal Usonian or Organic houses. In thinking about these houses, I am reminded of Kenneth Frampton’s essay “Critical Regionalism” that attempted to draw some boundaries on aspects of late Modernist architecture that incorporated local references, cultural and climatic, alongside more codified tenets of International Modernism. I think this category of Critical Regional applies itself well to many of Haertling’s works, none more so than the handful of dramatic, highly articulated sloping-roofed houses in the Boulder foothills.

All of these houses are experiments in distilling the house down to its constituent parts as expressed by a dominant, sheltering roof. The Damman I House (Haertling designed two houses for the Dammans, House I and House II) may be seen as series of soaring vertical spaces reminiscient of jutting rock outcrops, but it is the crisply folded roof forms that terminate these tall spaces that most define this house. Boulder was founded in the mid-1800s and its most expressive residential architecture, like most of Colorado, is dominated by tall, vertically-oriented Victorian frame houses. The Damman House borrows those tall proportions and the sun-blocking shelter provided by large overhangs and reinterprets these forms with Modernist language. The cantilevered balconies echo Victorian porches as the project off the main forms of the house and provide additional solar protection.

The McConnell House feels like a hybrid between vertical geometries of the Damman I House and the more angular, sharply incised forms of the Noble House, designed a decade previous. The Noble House sits low to the ground, a house expressed as almost solely composed of a roof, more akin to miner’s huts or the platform tents that made up the original Chautauqua settlement just south of this site. This is a house distilled down to a single form - the gable roof - doubled upon itself. This is a single, unitary form, not unlike the organic Brenton House, a figure isolated on its site, without regard to neighbors or adjacent houses.

Taking that idea of a house as a single, sloping tent form to an extreme, the Northstar Court house simplifies this form into two teepee like shapes topped with skylights. I don’t think Haertling is explictly referencing the Native American tent forms that would have been found in this part of Colorado, but it seems almost impossible not to see that influence in this house. Its large, sloping covered carport is the only sign that this house is not simply a cedar shingle clad tent. Like so many of Haertling’s houses, it is profoundly private, almost opaque to the street, and opening up with a massive glass facade that faces the Flatirons to the South.

Placing these houses under the rubric of Critical Regionalism may be a bit of a stretch, but I do think they sit comfortably within Frampton’s descriptions as well as being created at the waning days of Modernism’s classic period when architects were searching form new, more relevant forms that reflected both their clients enthusiasms and their unique landscape and climate. Warping Modernist forms with both local cultural and historical influences, as well as inventing forms that respond to local climate and landscape, this set of Haertling’s houses certainly deserve to be studied as fine examples of Critical Regionalist Modern masterpieces. They form the third formal category of his work, along with the Usonian and Organic houses, and their complexities and multi-faceted influences deserve much more study and appreciation.

copyright 2019 Mark Gerwing, M. Gerwing Architects, all rights reserved